Hi, if you arrived here and don’t find much, this post tries to explain why I’m using Facebook as a placeholder rather than a space to share my life:

I find Facebook creepy

Whenever I’m on Facebook (Fb) I feel I’m being observed and analysed by computer code (AI/artificial intelligence) or the faceless programmers behind that code. It’s like being on the wrong side of a one-way mirror in a psychiatric ward.

Facebook makes me feel manipulated

When I respond on a friend’s feed, I’m conscious that strangers will also read my comment. So how I might normally communicate becomes mediated by a mostly invisible audience: another one-way mirror. So the question is for whom am I doing this?

Facebook makes me feel cheap

I resist posting to Fb because then you’ll get a message announcing ‘Hendrik updated his status.’ This is frankly embarrassing: my ‘status(!?)’, nothing less. I find the whole business patronising and coercive.

I find Facebook depressing

Is it the shade of blue or the font, or that we’re all crammed in there desperate for affirmation? I want to run a mile!

Facebook is changing the nature of relationship

To communicate is to be with someone. By being, I mean listening carefully from a place of silence. Otherwise, what’s the point? How can I or anyone else do that on Fb?

Facebook’s now calling the shots

The last time I logged onto Fb I learnt important news from a good friend’s feed. It came as a shock as I wouldn’t have known otherwise. The implications are that I must dutifully log on to Fb like everyone else for news that might formerly have been shared directly. But it’s logical that if everyone’s on Fb why have a conversation with only one. It’s economics.

A matter of principle

Many of the over one billion people who daily ‘do their Fb’ have apparently never used a Web browser and therefore assume Fb is the World Wide Web (WWW), which it isn’t. Fb is an app – as in application – which (together with the other Fb-owned apps: Instagram and WhatsApp) is luring and then locking the world behind its walls. So I’m walking my own path, thereby supporting the WWW by blogging instead (see below)

Where I post

Please visit me on the WWW at the following URL where I try, as in this post, to understand what’s actually going on: www.hendrikmentz.com, alternatively email me: info@hendrikmentz.com.

Acknowledgments

The following two Medium posts suggested I do likewise, namely, analyse and share, on Facebook and elsewhere, my fear of and aversion to Facebook:

What follows is a transcription of sections of video footage shot by eNCA of an interview conducted by political analyst Justice Malala with South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. The interview formed part of the annual Cape Town Open Book Festival hosted by the Book Lounge.

Friend and writer, Ken Barris, put me onto Darryl Earl David, language lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and initiator of a number of literary festivals that are helping keep reading, writers and publishers alive in South Africa.

Darryl Earl David co-organiser of the Booktown Richmond Literary Festival

Paul Ashton, Jungian analyst, Ken Barris, writer, critic and friend and three readers who helped shape the text: Louis de Villiers, Joshua Mentz and Matthew Mentz, and Llewellyn Alberts – quoted at the head of chapter eight, were asked to present at the launch of my indie-published book ‘Enter’. This is what they said.

‘Enter’ saw the light of day almost a year earlier but when the Book Lounge declined to include the book in their launch programme the books remained in their boxes under the bench in the lounge for close on a year.

I manage a small agroecology farming operation in Suurbraak on behalf of my son (Matt) and daughter-in-law (Sasha). On my return Japie Present reported that when he had tried to secure the ducks and chickens for the night he wasn’t able to find the fourth duck.

Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savour it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savour the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, savouring must come first (E.B. White)